“Palin and Obama lacked realistic experience for high national office but possessed star quality that – abracadabra! – made their inexperience a virtue to enthusiasts who believed that Palin and Obama were originals who’d forge stunning new solutions to our seemingly intractable dilemmas. Each had a unique way of making unrealistic generalities sound like plausible proposals – if one didn’t look too closely, and continue to look.”
Great article by Michael Ventura in the November 19 issue of the Austin Chronicle. Ventura essentially argues that President Obama and former Governor Palin are both merely substance-less archetypes to which the public can fantasize about being the solution to all of our problems. But Aho, he doesn’t stop there. Good political writing at the street level is hard to find.
We may be the most informed generation in history and the yet, the most apathetic. We need writers like Ventura, David Sanger, Matt Tabbi and Jim Hightower to cut the shit and pull back the veil. But that’s not all. We need to be watchdogs of the Media and media-related issues so that these guys can continue to find print.
Facts should speak for themselves. We must consider who or what is presenting us with the facts. All I can remember from watching a sun-burnt Ted Koppel as he stood on the frontlines in Bagdad on a March night back in ‘03 was that his hair was perfect. No bombs, no shrapnel, no carnage; in other words no real reporting on the realities of the who-what-when-where-and-why of War.
Why, exactly, were 70 websites seized by the Department of Homeland Security? What kind of cheap trick was the FBI pulling when they sold of a van filled with faux explosives to a 19-year-old Somalian kid in Portland over the Thanksgiving Holiday? We need to know that 195,055 votes were discovered as uncounted in New York City almost a month after the mid-term elections.
These things that move in the night, they can be a byline in between a twinkle and a smile or they can be an alarm.
Let’s keep the channels open. I don’t want mainstream-Media to take me out to dinner if all I’m gonna do is be fucked. Keep media free. Connect. Read. Speak your truth.
Or we will get fooled again.
Going for the Throat 